Video: Adding flags, stars, and labels more quickly

Now that we know a little bit about how we can rate or rank our photographs by using flags, stars, or color labels, what I want to do here is talk about how we can speed up our work flow when we're adding these different criteria. Because one of the things that you'll discover is that this is something that you'll do quite frequently. So in order to speed up our work flow when it comes to rating or ranking our pictures, Lets take a look at a few techniques that we can use. Now we already know that we can use the Arrow keys in order to scroll through photographs. Here I'll go ahead and tap the Right Arrow key in order to move forward through these pictures. Now whenever you come to a photograph that you want to add a flag or star or color labeled to. You obviously can go to this area on the toolbar and simply click on the icon. Or you can also use some really valuable shortcuts.

In part two of Chris Orwig's Lightroom Essentials, you'll learn how to add important metadata to your images that will help you find and filter your library, process images and video, and export, email, and share photos—all from within the powerful Library module in Adobe Lightroom. First you'll learn how to flag, rate, and rank your photos and use the information to find images that match those criteria. Then tag them with locations and add keywords and identifying information that clearly distinguish the subject and your copyright. Chris also shows you how to make image adjustments with Quick Develop, and play, trim, and edit video. Lastly, find out how to export your photographs to a hard drive, email them to friends and clients, and upload them to sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook.

Adding flags, stars, and labels more quickly

Now that we know a little bit about how we can rate or rank our photographs by usingflags, stars, or color labels, what I want to do here is talk about how we canspeed up our work flow when we're adding these different criteria.Because one of the things that you'll discover is that this is something thatyou'll do quite frequently. So in order to speed up our work flow whenit comes to rating or ranking our pictures, Lets take a look at a fewtechniques that we can use. Now we already know that we can use theArrow keys in order to scroll through photographs.Here I'll go ahead and tap the Right Arrow key in order to move forward through these pictures.Now whenever you come to a photograph that you want to add a flag or star or colorlabeled to. You obviously can go to this area on thetoolbar and simply click on the icon. Or you can also use some really valuable shortcuts.

In order to highlight the shortcuts, I want to jump to another slide where I havethese shortcuts listed. And here it is.You can see that for flagging we have three shortcuts.I recommend that you write these down. What I would do is on a scratch piece ofpaper write the word flag and then P, U and X.You press the P key in order to flag an image as a pick.Press the 'u' key in order to unpick, and then the 'x' key allows you to reject a photograph.Next we have zero to five. Press the three key to add a three-starrating, zero to remove all of the stars altogether, or you can press any of theother numbers as well between one thru 'five.

Next we have color labels. Color labels work a little bit differently.If you press the six key, that will allow you to add a red label, press the seventhat will allow you to add a yellow label. If you want to remove a label, we'll justtap the number key again, for example press the seven key to add a yellow label,press the seven key again in order to remove it.Now I wanted to highlight these short cuts again because this is something that we'llbe using quite often. Well lets take a look at how this works in LightRoom.Well here I've come across a photograph that I like.

I want to add a flag to this one. To do that I'll tap the P key to flag thatas a pic. Next I'll give this one a three starrating because the photograph is good. It isn't great.Its not good enough for my portfolio, so I'll go ahead and tap the three key to addthat three star rating. Then let's say that I want to print thispicture and I've decided that the red label is that label which signifies orwhich sort of sets those images apart which I eventually want to print.To add that label here we'll just press the six key.You can see how I added the flag, the star and the color label.

Now, to change any of those let's go back to the beginning.Let's go back to the flags here. You can unpick this by pressing the U key.So again, P for pick, U for unpick. We can also determine that this one is areject photograph. To do that tap the X key and here you cansee it's rejected. To remove that just press the U key inorder to remove any flag, really not together.All right. Well, what about the star rating here?Well here we can tap the zero key to remove all the stars or you can press onefor one star, two for two or three or four.

Here can change the star rating really quickly.Last but not least we have some shortcuts for those color labels, as I mentioned,that's six through nine. When I tap the seven key, I get a yellowlabel, eight key I get a green label. To remove any of the labels, just tap thatnumber key again. So, press eight once to add a green label,press it again in order to remove it. Alright well let's go back and let's addthe flag rating. I'll press P to give this one a flag rating.Three stars and then tap the six key to add that red lable and in this way you canquickly go through your photographs and you can add these different criteria.

Now you may be wondering well, what's best.Should I use flag, should I use stars, should I use colored labels?Well it really doesn't matter and what I've encountered is that certainphotographers love flags, others really like stars and then others like colored labels.So again what you want to do is just pick a system.Which is consistent and cohesive for you, in other words you want to make sureyou're always rating and ranking your pictures in the same exact way.What I tend to do in my own workflow is this, let me navigate to anotherphotograph, this one here. I like this photograph, I think the familywill like this picture, so I'm going to add a star rating to it.

I tend to not use flags very often except for the reject option which I'll talkabout in a few minutes. I tend to really focus in on stars andlabels, and that's just my own preference. What I tend to do is have a pretty lowstar rating. Rather than over inflating the starrating, I like to keep that nice and low, so I can then later Increase the starrating for those pictures that are really phenomenal.So with this image, I might give it a two or a three star rating.So here, I'll go ahead and add that two stars.Then I do use this red label. And what I like to do for the red label isto just say, you know what? This image is not only a two or three starrated photograph. But it has something that's a little bitextra in it. And I may want to revisit that at another time.

Perhaps this image might be good to use when I print out some pictures for the client.Or maybe I might want to post this photograph on a blog, or use it in one of courses.Or who knows what, but again, for me that red label's at that little label, thatlittle sticky note that I put on the footer after to say hey.Go back to that picture, there may something worthwhile to do at that one.So here I'll add that red color label. And of course you can do that by clickingon those icons or just tapping the number keys.That would be a two for the two star rating, and then a six for the red label.

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